Archive for category Presentations

I’m happy to let you know I’ll be speaking at the 2018 ALN (Agile Leadership Network) Conference in Houston, on April 21. Here’s the topic that got selected:

Testing in Agile: from Afterthought to Integral Part

Testing cannot be an afterthought; it has to be an integral part of software development. Is it something that QA teams do? Or is it part of a developer’s duties? Do business analysts play any role in it? What is test automation? Unit test, Integration test, Test-Driven Development, Behavior-Driven Development… what do those mean?!This session addresses all of those questions, as we talk through the importance of tests, the collaboration among team members, the techniques, and practices around different kinds of automated testing.

This is a new talk I’m putting together and I’m very excited I’ll be presenting it soon.

I’m speaking at Houston Tech Fest this weekend. I always have a great time there so I always look forward to it. I’ll be giving the two talks below. If you attend to my sessions, please click the “link for feedback” for the session you attended and give me your feedback so I can work on improving it.

Be a Professional Developer and Write Clean Code (Keynote)9:30-10:30am (Room 300)Professional developers must write the best code possible, given what they know and what they have at the moment of writing. After a while, we may look at that code and wonder “wow, what was I thinking?”, and that’s a good thing: it shows we have improved. This session is about my observations regarding code I either wrote or had to work with.Link for feedback

Beyond the Daily Stand-up: An Intro to Scrum (Keynote)5:20-6:20pm (Room 304)Countless companies believe they’re doing Scrum because they have 30-minute daily stand-ups (with people sitting and staring at their laptops) every morning. But Scrum is really a lot more than that. In this session, we see all of the main parts of Scrum (roles, artifacts, and events), and we also talk about some real-world collaborations in teams who adopted Scrum.Link for feedback

Whenever I’m not giving a talk, I’ll most likely be hanging at the Improving booth. Make sure to come by and say hi! 🙂

Code Review: I mean no harm!As part of the work I’ve been doing for many years, I get to do a lot of code review. I usually document things that come up doing a code review so I can share it with other developers in the teams. In this session, I share some of the code I’ve looked at, the reasons why the code raised yellow or red flags in my head, and possible solutions I’ve proposed.

This is a fun talk for me and I’ve received great feedback from those who have seen it recently. It’s also going to be the first HDNUG meeting hosted at the new Improving Houston office. So I’m excited!

Here’s the location:10111 Richmond Ave, Suite 100, Houston, TX 77042

Click here for directions. There’s plenty of free parking right at the location. See you there!

UPDATE: If you attend this talk, please, give me feedback by following this link. It’ll be a big help so I can improve it.

As part of the work I’ve been doing for many years, I get to do a lot of code review. I usually document things that come up doing a code review so I can share it with other developers in the teams. In this session, I share some of the code I’ve looked at, the reasons why the code raised yellow or red flags in my head, and possible solutions I’ve proposed.

The Software Does Not Work? Rewrite it!

What’s this session really about?

Outdated technology? Unmaintainable codebase? Politics? Those are just some of the reasons that cause software rewrites. Whether a rewrite is really what is needed or not, chances are we all work in such projects.Do we rewrite the entire software? Can we rewrite just parts of it? Where do we start? Can we automate the process?In the last 15 years, I’ve worked in a variety of such projects. I’d like to share the most important lessons I’ve learned in these projects. In this talk, I’ll share the different types of rewrites and techniques, what I learned from it, and how it changed my way of approaching both software rewrites as well as greenfield projects.

I want your feedback!!

I hope to see some of my readers there! If you do show up there, please rate my session afterwards and provide me some feedback here! Like I said, it’s a brand new session, so I’m looking forward to constructive criticism so I can improve my material.

I’ll be speaking at the Houston Tech Fest 2016 this Saturday. If you haven’t heard of this event, it’s a huge 1-day conference, free of charge, with tons of sessions (11 tracks!).

I’ve presented sessions there for at least 5 editions of the conference, and after a 3-year hiatus, I’m happy to be back, as I’ve known so many people there and have always had a great time.

Below you find information about the sessions I’ll be delivering and the panel I’ll participate, so make sure to come by and say hi. 🙂

Oh, also, if you come attend to my sessions and enjoy it, you can also contact Improving and request I come to your company for a Lunch and Learn! Check out the list of sessions available and spread the word out: Free Improving Lunch and Learns.

Software Development is a Joke!

Room 305 (SoftDev) at 1pm

Several of my technical presentations introduce some kind of humor, but sometimes people end up learning the joke and not the concept. So I decided to do a humor presentation based on software development, introduce some technical stuff, and maybe people won’t laugh, but rather learn the technical stuff!

After so many years writing software, I can’t help but laugh at so many (good and bad!) experiences myself and other developers have had. Not to mention things that just can’t make sense to normal people: how can this ˆ[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$ be called a regular expression? (If you know by heart what that expression means, you are probably the kind of people who’ll try to explain to me why zerobased arrays are kinda cool…just don’t!).

The Business of Software (Panel)

Room 306 (Mobile)

Want to build software? Get your act together first!

Room 300 (Mixed) at 4:10pm

Software developers are supposed to create applications that make people’s life easier, automating tedious tasks, encouraging users to get their work done, organizing complex workflows into digestible information and actions, helping them separate the most important information from the least important.
But still, most developers forget to automate their own boring tasks. We forget to organize our information. We sometimes use tools that do not help us get our work done. So how can we build software that fits our client needs, if we don’t understand those needs ourselves?
This session is not only about software development; this session is about things we can do and tools we can use to organize ourselves, so we can free up our minds to more important things. Tools covered in this session include (but not limited to): Evernote, application launchers, screen capture tools, tablets, smartphones, etc.